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- Written by Rex M. Rogers
Increasing incidences of violence—or “acting out” as it’s called today—in and around American sports are symptoms of deeper, wider, larger cultural problems. At least it’s difficult not to interpret sports-related violence this way.
And why shouldn’t we do so? High school, college, and professional athletics are not a world unto themselves despite what a few sports celebrities seem to think. Athletics is simply another thing we do in culture, our way of life.
Athletics at its best is a time-honored form of competitive fun, full of human drama, sacrifice, extraordinary effort and resolve even in defeat, sportsmanship and honor. It’s a form of self-expression that taps all human characteristics, including what religion calls sin. Unfortunately, we don’t escape ourselves in sports. The human dilemma still exists. We are both good and evil, so people cheat, lie, and “act out.”
This year’s preseason NFL games were marked by a rising tide of fan violence. August 20, at the San Francisco-Oakland game, fans fought in the stands, two men were shot outside the stadium, a person was beaten in a restroom, and security ejected 70 while police arrested 12—all over a game. We Americans used to look with smirks, smugness, and superiority upon soccer fan behavior worldwide, but no more. We can get into senseless violence just like everyone else. What happened to “family entertainment”?
After the Canucks lost in the Stanley Cup NHL final fans rioted and burned in the streets, embarrassing a city and a sport, even if one known for on-ice fights. At a San Francisco Giants vs LA Dodgers game earlier this year a man was severely beaten. Similar violence has occurred at university and even high school athletic events, including the chanting of vulgar language aimed at opposing players.
Police and others suggest several reasons: alcohol, sold vigorously and consumed in quantity, in the stadium and at pre-game tailgating; higher ticket prices; joblessness; social media making us more aware of incidences that were there all along, and so it goes.
But none of this gets to the core of a generation coming of age with a greater sense of entitlement and fewer learned self-limitations than ever before. Nor does it acknowledge that American culture is becoming more capricious and violent across the board—more “random” mass murderers on university campuses, in malls, at high schools, more public figures enduring threats and employing security, more family violence and “He was such a quiet, nice boy” killers “acting out.”
It sounds too simple or maybe too complex in a philosophic sort of way, but I think it’s true: the generations coming of age in American culture now are a long way from the Greatest Generation in their understanding of individual responsibility, initiative, work ethic, character principles like integrity, willingness to defer gratification or sacrifice, and earn goals, even a willingness to set goals, and most of all, understanding and embracing the difference between right and wrong. Younger generations including to some extent my own Boomers were not taught right and wrong.
So if something isn’t going the way you want, you “act out.” You fight verbally or physically, you simply take what you think is owed, you cheat, you lie. In the worst cases, people respond violently.
I don’t think the answer is more security, better trained and better paid police, or more stringent alcohol policies. Sports venues are trying: at a recent Michigan State University football game the announcer borrowed from airports, telling people "If you see something, say something." I support all these efforts,, but I don't think they will solve the problem. I think the problem is deeper, going to the root of what it means to be a human being first and an American second. We’ve lost our sense of limits, which is to say law and order.
Ironically, limits liberate, at least the right kind of limits do. Limits based upon respect for life, others, and property, for example. Such limits free us to live, work, and pursue happiness. We’ve lost a lot of them, so we do what’s right in our own eyes—a not so good plan.
Government can’t provide a right sense of limits or vision of hope, nor certainly can corporations or athletics. Only we can do this, but we need help. Where, I want to know, are the churches?
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2011
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Rex or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow him at www.twitter.com/RexMRogers.
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- Written by Ruth Thomas
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- Written by Rex M. Rogers
It’s happened to me many times, two out of three times this week. A woman sitting near me in the Delta Sky Club Lounge at MSP says, “Are you going to be here for awhile?”
“Yes,” I say. “Could you watch my phone,” she says. Her phone is getting its charge in a nearby receptacle. “Sure,” says me.
She goes away for maybe ten minutes, returns, never looks at me, never says “Thanks,” never says a word. I’m thinking, “What am I? Chopped liver?”
At the doctor’s office recently I notice an older woman coming in a few yards behind me, I wait, hold a door, she says, “Oh, I’m slow,” then after passing through, “Thanks.” At another nearby medical office I’m leaving, I see a young woman, obviously pregnant, walking out behind me. I stutter step to slow down, hold two doors, she glances at me, never says a word and walks on.
I tell these two doctor’s office stories because the 60-something said, “Thanks,” and the 20-something did not. I’m not one to dump on the younger generation, but I see and hear this pattern regularly. In my estimation the younger generation has for the most part lost the art of saying, “Thank you.”
I’ll never forget holding a door in 1981 for a coed entering the University of Cincinnati Student Union behind me. She cussed me for doing so in no uncertain and rather loud terms. She didn’t bother to develop her point of view, but I surmise that in her mind I had somehow violated her feminine liberation by my blatant act of chauvinism. Apparently she felt I had not yet learned that women were more than capable of making it on their own.
But this isn’t just a young person’s thing. I’ve experienced this many times over in professional settings. Sometimes the omission is so glaring it’s astounding. People simply assume you should meet their needs, don’t give it, which is to say you, a second thought, or have never been taught good manners in the first place.
I realize that if I extend kindnesses to others in order to garner “Thank yous,” than there is something wrong with my attitude and actions. But I really don’t think that’s what’s going on here.
I think my Boomer Generation and those who come after us have shed some of our mannerly sensibilities, if we were ever taught them in the first place. While you can find a thousand individual exceptions to this statement, I still think we live in a coarser age. The zeitgeist of the early 21st Century, at least in American culture, is more about Me, the individual, than Others. Add to this a sense of entitlement and you get what we have, a culture that’s lost the art of saying “Thanks.”
I’m certainly not perfect, much less a model. But I’m trying to remember to say “Thanks” more often and certainly when it is deserved, even more when someone has done something for me or mine that, clearly, they did not have to do.
My son-in-law, Joe Drouillard, supports my website, gratis, on his server, at www.jddesignstudio.com. “Thanks, Joe.”
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2011
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Rex or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow him at www.twitter.com/RexMRogers.
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- Written by Rex M. Rogers
The NCAA Division I Board of Directors is meeting this week. That’s 54 university presidents and chancellors and 13 school and athletics conference professionals representing big-time athletics. On tap is an agenda fueled by what for a better way of describing it was a year of collegiate sports characterized as much by cheating and non-compliance as by championships.
Some 13 major violations cases were identified involving multiple sports: Last year, University of Southern California received numerous penalties for violations in its football, men's basketball and women's tennis programs. Football accounted for more cases (55%) than any other sport, followed by men's basketball (45%).
Top of the heap: Ohio State University’s scandal that didn’t have to happen. “If only,” if only last spring Coach Jim Tressel would have reported his players’ rules violations, put them on suspension, and let them and the program take their medicine. Had he done this, rather than covering up for them and for his own behavior, had he done this rather than coaching his team to a bowl championship, OSU wouldn’t be at risk today of losing more than its self-vacated 12-1 season including the bowl win, along with a two-year probation.
The question is, will the NCAA Committee on Infractions, also meeting this week, have the backbone to level more sanctions? If I had to guess, I’d say “No.” It has the authority to do this for the integrity of sport, but it hasn’t up to now at least demonstrated it has the grit to do what’s needed. The Board of Directors could demand sanctions, but this isn’t likely either.
I’m not anti-OSU. I’ve watched OSU football for years, and I was grieved along with a lot of others by Jim Tressel’s outing as a cheater. He’s the one primarily responsible, but OSU Athletics knew more than it is letting on and is too easily tossing Coach Tressel under the bus as its sacrificial lamb. In my book the Athletics Department leadership, which unfortunately is to say the university, must also be held accountable—not for retribution but for responsibility and to try to help set a new standard of expectation and integrity in NCAA Division I nationally. It's not a pretty picture, but in the long run, reform and restored integrity will benefit all of sports.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2011
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Rex or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow him at www.twitter.com/RexMRogers.
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- Written by Rex M. Rogers
Parenting is, I’m afraid, a dying art. At least it seems that way whenever I walk among the masses, watch, listen, and wonder.
I don’t know everything there is to know about rearing children well, and I certainly was not a perfect father; in fact, far from it. But thanks in large measure to a good mother our four children, now up and out, are good, well balanced, thinking young adults who, if I died today, would do well in the world without me. I am grateful to the Lord and my wife and my kids for this. And along the way I learned a little about parenting.
What makes me think parenting is a dying art is what I see and hear just about every time I take a trip. Here are a few wonders just this week:
--Ambling through a store I see a 10-11 year-old boy with his mother. As I walk by I hear the boy use language with and at his mother that blows my hat back. Mother ignores him. Where did this kid learn to talk like that? And why on earth does his mother put up with it? Does she think he’ll simply grow out of the attitudes underlying the vocabulary? Does she think his choice of words is appropriate, good, and good for him? I don’t get it.
--Sitting in a restaurant we see a family approach the counter to order pizza. One teenage son is dressed in jeans so tight you can see every outline of his anatomy. Another perhaps 12 year-old son is wearing a t-shirt proclaiming in large letters “I Love Boobies.” Mom and Dad seem oblivious, which I guess is the problem. Do they really believe how their sons dress is admirable? Do they think how their sons dress is good for them or funny? I don’t get it.
--Walking down the street we’re approached by a family of five, parents probably in their early 40s, three daughters. Each daughter is dressed in a manner prominently exposing, let us say, frontage. Little is left to the imagination. Is this bold immodesty the mother and father’s vision for their girls? Or do the parents believe cutting edge fashion outweighs all other considerations? If the parents don’t like how their daughters are dressing, are they so powerless as to lack any influence upon them at all? I don’t get it.
--Sitting on a ferryboat awaiting departure we watch a family board and sit two rows behind us: mother-now-grandmother, two adult sisters, and four young children belonging to one or both sisters. The younger sister is irate, proclaiming loudly to her sister how she wasn’t awakened soon enough, had not been given any help, was somehow peeved because they were rushed getting on the boat, etc. Mother-Grandmother says, “I’m staying out of this.” Older sister verbally hits back, though not quite so loudly. Younger won’t let it go. This goes on for perhaps five minutes not only in the hearing of everyone near the stern but, more grievously, in the hearing of all the children, who watched with eyes big and mouths, and more importantly, ears open. How could the sister-mothers miss the fact that their kids were getting a lesson in how not to manage anger? Couldn’t their issue have been handled privately? How will the kids act the next time they’re upset? Bigger question: why did Mother-Grandmother let her “kids” do that? I don’t get it.
Not all parents, thankfully, are like this. But in my estimation far too many are abdicating their parental responsibilities, or at least are approaching parenting with a form of presumed powerlessness our grandparents’ generation wouldn’t recognize. I don’t get it.
Children are sponges. They soak up what’s around them. Children are world-class mimics. They imitate whatever is put in front of them. In other words, they'll do what they see and they'll do what parents let them do. Children find security in being given wise and loving instruction, even when they say and act otherwise. In the end, children are best-loved by parents who set good and high standards, model those standards in their own lives, and expect the children to do the same. It works. It’s good for the kids. I get that.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2011
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Rex or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow him at www.twitter.com/RexMRogers.